My Auntie G was amazing. A five-foot-two-inch powerhouse of determination, opinion, passion and sometimes anger, but mostly I remember the love. Love of a kind that left you feeling that she could solve the UK's energy crisis by simply attaching a crocodile clip to wherever it came from. (Where is the socket for the soul? In my most maudlin moments, of which there are many, I like to think it involves a silk plug rested on that bit of the neck that makes you go shivery)

Auntie G has been gone since March 2009; but the breast cancer that took half her chest before seeping its despicable poison into her bones had been with her for eighteen months or so. It was hearbreaking to see her return from every oncologist appointment with the banal yet devastating report, "Still waiting for good news, cock."

The three years since have been revealing in many ways.

It became obvious that she was the hub of our entire family; something we had taken for granted previously. From my Nan & Grandad, her siblings, myself, my cousins and onto our children, she was the fulcrum around which we all revolved, quite literally, as her house was the place we congregated in.

She was never bothered about toddlers tipping cupboards out, our children stayed up too late and ate too many forbidden foods on sleepovers, and she would make the endless, mandatory cups of hot drink that British family gatherings demand.

Auntie G's coffee was always served in a cup and saucer. I never asked why. I wish I had now.

It's a cliche to say that she is always with us, but that does not make it less true. Each time good school reports or loving drawings are produced by her great nieces and nephews, when Ronan Keating appears on TV or radio, when I am breathing out of my eyeballs climbing a long hill on my bike she is there. She is respectively proud, giddy or an example of what people can go through and to stop being such a bloody wuss!

Her daughter, my cousin, is marrying next year. She would be so proud, so happy, so domineering, such a bloody nightmare about the arrangements, but most of all she would be here.

She isn't.

We would trade the daylight tomorrow and the next day, and the next if that could be changed.

Great Uncles are often distant relatives for many; mine is not.tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e39824cab28833014e872d3e1c970d2011-04-02T03:26:56+01:002011-04-02T04:44:07+01:00My great uncle was diagnosed with untreatable cancer this week at the age of 75. I am devastated. But how to convey this to colleagues and friends? Mum, Dad, siblings or grandparents befalling such a fate they can understand, but the nuanced relationship that is mine with a bloke that...blood&mud

My great uncle was diagnosed with untreatable cancer this week at the age of 75. I am devastated.

But how to convey this to colleagues and friends? Mum, Dad, siblings or grandparents befalling such a fate they can understand, but the nuanced relationship that is mine with a bloke that married my maternal grandmother's sister in the 1960s is harder to empathise with for many. "He's had a good knock, plus he's not even blood is he?" I hear them think.

I have been lucky enough to have a young family come before me, so I have known my maternal grandparents for all of my 35 years (my father's side are distant) and I love them dearly, but my great uncle is a marvel, and an extra grandparent to me in many ways.

I lived around the corner from him as a child and I would go to his and my Auntie's house after school to await my parent's return from work, and sometimes before as my mum took the bus to Manchester, fifteen miles away. His shifts as a bus driver would often mean he was in to offer to me a myriad of after-school food choices that were always basically chips, but involved a list of questions akin to a census return:

"Do you want chips, cock?"

"yes, please"

"Do you want oven ones or pan ones?

"Pan if it's not too much trouble"

"And do you want 'em on a plate or in a paper cone?" (he would make one if asked)

"Er, a plate's fine"

"Reet, what about sauce? on't top or on't side?"

And so it went on, nothing was too much trouble.

He would take me fishing in the holidays, we would fish with with a tree-branch, cotton and a match as a float; he would tell me long stories of how he pioneered giant kites from brown paper, like a small-town Howard Hughes; how he and his brothers could probably have built an aircraft carrier with their combined skills; and how he knew every bus route in western Greater Manchester. It was his job, of course, but even at a young age I could sense he took pride in the 'expert' status his work gave him - something I have aspired to in my career, albeit in a very different field.

Moreover he is marvellously yet understatedly eccentric; refusing to throw anything away, regardless of how ostensibly useless to you or I - at one count he had eleven frying pans; creator of many hilarious rhymes that usually have something to do with having a shit, or pooh itself; collector of model cars, but not even rare or valuable ones, which he fills shelves with in his marital bedroom; and loving the music of Johnny Mathis far more than is decent.

More than all of this, he is the happiest and most contented man I have ever known, even with the nearly twenty years of Chronic Obstucted Pulminory Disease he has endured. His inability to breathe properly simply made him quiter, not different, and my young children adore him.

He has refused to ask how long he has left, which considering he has always lived life one bargain supermarket purchase to the next is no great surprise, and he has taken the news philosophically and with a quiet, stoic bravery typical of such northern men of his time, and typical of him.